P is for Patagonia

I’m in the middle of the A-Z challenge, listing bucket lists of places that I’ve not been, but would I’d like to visit in my life.  I doubt I will be able to make every one of these trips, but one can hope.

There are a number of places I’d like to visit that beings with a P.  I have already been to Pennsylvania, having spent several years living there while in school.  But I’ve yet to go to Peru, which I would love.  Nor have I been to Prague, which is a city on my short lists of cities to visit and to pay homage to Jan Hus. And then there is Poland.  But highest on my list is Patagonia, that vast wide-open land in Argentina, at the bottom of South America.  The high desert, the beauty of the big-sky, the mountains and lakes and rocky moist coastline creates an incredible place.  

The second Paul Threoux book I read was Old Patagonia Express.  It was a trip that he did, mostly by rail, catching the train in Boston and (as much as possible) riding rails all the way to bottom of the America’s.  That old steam train to Esquel appears to still run but doesn’t connect to the main line that does still run some 800 kms from Viedma to Bariloche (Atlantic Ocean to the Andes).  In addition to taking the train, I’d want to make a trip to Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) at the end of continent.  All photos "lifted" from the internet.  

Back in 2007, I reviewed an Argentinian movie, “Intimate Stories” that had nothing to do with the bedroom or a sleazy motels (the name was a bad translation from the Spanish).  The movie was filmed along the empty highways and in the small towns of Patagonia, places that seem to call my name.  I’d love to go experience it.